


Bereishis - Genesis (and we become)

by Trekkele



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Gaila (Star Trek: Alternate Original Series), Based on a Tumblr Post, F/M, Gen, Kissing, Orion, becoming, mentions of child abuse, orion culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2020-01-01 04:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18329066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trekkele/pseuds/Trekkele
Summary: /Now the earth was astonishingly empty, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the water.And She said, "Let there be light," and there was light./There are an infinite number of ways to break. There are only so many ways to put it back together.Gaila, and becoming.





	Bereishis - Genesis (and we become)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Bereishis](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18328790) by [Trekkele](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trekkele/pseuds/Trekkele). 



> this was meant to be for International Womens Day 2019, but then i remembered that appreciating women transcends both time and space, so why limit myself.  
> (also i'm bad at deadlines)  
> originally meant to be an expansion of my tumblr post, but it went a little different. mentions of prostitution (vaguely) child abuse, kissing between friends, and road trips. Also arranged marriage (not the fun kind) and death. I think that covers most, if you want me to add a warning please let me know!

 

**(Oris, StarDate 2246)**

 

The sky above Oris has always been steeped with a million stars, a thousand dreams extending above the canopy of the compound her mother tells her to call home.

 Home is a bed where her brother reads her his books and her father tells stories about how the worlds used to be.

This courtyard is not home.

“You will be a great diplomat.” Her mother says, head tilted so that the golden sunlight hits her hair just so, a hand on Gaila’s shoulder, stroking her skin between the burnished curls and her slip. 

She does not think she wants to be a diplomat. Her mother walks, silk trailing beneath her ankles as the ruby on her neck flashes brightly. “You will bring many to my door, hoping for an alliance. You will help me with my kingdom.” 

The citizen's they pass know better then to stare with anything but awe. Some pray swaying steps, an aching pattern reserved for seeing a goddess walk, a maker made mortal. Her mother preens, the hold on her  shoulder loosening as she waves a benevolent hand to her subjects. She does not notice Gaila's bowed shoulders or wilting steps.

She has seen many species, in her years, all dancing court to her mother's gold dipped feet. The shivering blue-green skin of the girls around her, their black as night curls dancing silently in the breeze remind her of them, all awe and honey and a faint worry that nothing here is as it seems. 

People come from hundreds of skies to see her, Hori-uH, Oris, Orion. They may call her different things, but they all come.

She is told here that they come for the same reason.

She finds it strange, when the court-mother says that - but she learns. They all come to Oris for one reason, one reason only.

 

“For you, my children. For her beautiful daughters.” she says with a smile that isn't quite a smile, a friendly wink that is too heavy to trust. “Now come, my little diplomats. You will all learn to be the jewels in the Oris crown.”

There is a sway to the court-mothers steps she recognizes, the way her hips dip to the golden clink of her coined belts. Power. A diplomat has power, she knows, over others, over her people, over those that dare to meet their eyes. They follow, the shivering girls, slowly snaking behind the court-mother even as she spins more honey lies and silver tarnished truths over her shoulder. Gaila breaths, tilting her head to see the stars above the broke open stone.

 

Standing beneath a sky heavy with stars and golden auroras, she does not think they know what they should be looking for.

She does not think she is the beautiful one here.

 

* * *

 

**(Hawaii, 2253)**

 

She knows what she is, in the same way she has always known, and it isn't until someone else questions it that she realizes -

 

Somehow she has changed beyond what she was built to be and then what she built herself to be and the idea no longer frightens her the way it should. The way it would have.

She has been satisfied with existing and her existence has been fading for years, but there is nothing here that calls her to change.

 

Kai is the one who wanted to join StarFleet. She wanted to build engines, tear them apart and replace the bleeding gears with dilithium and sparking light. Kai points out that that is in fact what StarFleet does. What StarFleet can allow her to do.

She is eighteen, in human years, and twenty, in revolutions around Oris’s star. She has lived three different lives, a queen's daughter, a diplomat, a refugee.

She is content with leaving them all behind, if she gets to see a new sky. Maybe someday she will see golden auroras and it will almost be like home.

 

Kai arranges everything, speaking to the caitain who recruited him, explaining that his sister wishes to see more about the academy, and what they offer. She tosses the convention badge onto her desk, and then spends seven minutes digging through engine schematics and orion landscapes for it.

 

Kai trusts her. More importantly, perhaps, he trusts StarFleet cadets to behave themselves in a way citizens sometimes don’t, and she wonders off again and again, looking for something.

 

She doesn't know what yet.

 

There is a Vulcan, far too attractive for her age, observing the experimental robotics booth as they frantically try and control something they've apparently named “oppy”, much to the amusement of almost everyone around them.

“I've always found them delightfully overconfident.” The Vulcan says, dry tone betraying the humor she finds in the situation.

 

“Humans?” She asks, knowing that the Vulcan-Human alliance is solid, if unlikely, and built almost entirely on sharp wit and a mutual belief in the others conceit.

Gaila thinks part of her will always be a diplomat, storing information like gold and poking places she shouldn't for answers she may not want.

Fluttering eyelashes like knives.

 

“StarFleet” she says, with a single raised eyebrow, her lips tilted to a friendly smirk. “And, perhaps, humans.”

 

They observe silently, Gaila wondering if she should say anything else, or perhaps fade away, find a different booth to observe.

“Although, they always seem to get it the end.” That's definitely a smirk, watching the students sigh from relief as oppy the science drone finally does what its meant to.

 

“Yes.” She watches them, high fiving and proud whoops, blue skin on brown on pink on white.

 

“What are you looking for?” Gaila turns to find green eyes staring at her, and she doesn’t have an answer.

 

She did not know Vulcans could have green eyes. She did not know Vulcans could look so curious, a curved brow inviting, and a tilted head like a brown bird about to swoop in.

 

“I don’t know,” she confesses, less a whisper and more a plea, “Engines. And code, and computers built by dozens working together. The way things work, taken apart and explained,  and a world that doesn't care where I was born and what I was raised and maybe a place where I can do as I wish with no one telling me what I need to be.”

She clamps her mouth shut, eyes wide with horror because none of that was meant to be said. She has spent years never saying it.

 

The Vulcan doesn’t seem to mind.

 

“StarFleet has quite a lot of all that. Although there is a fair number of rules and people telling you what to do.” she twinkles, and Gaila loves her a little bit, for the easy way she leads, “At least at the beginning. Once you move up a bit, they forgive the backtalk.”

 

She can’t help but laugh, because StarFleet officers are fairly  famous for their charm and wit, for wiggling out of situations most would deem hopeless.

 

“What is your name?” she asks, following beside the woman she would later credit with starting her career.

 

“I am T’Pol,” she said, turning her head to grin in an oddly vulcan manner. “And I will sponsor you. And I assure you, Gaila Vro, you will find yourself. Here, or otherwhere, you seem certain to find yourself.”

 

* * *

 

**(Oris, StarDate 2249)**

 

There is a queen to the south who has outlawed diplomacy, has taught both her daughters to rule, has negotiated with federation and its allies alike. Sometimes she dreams, and she is a southern queen.

 

But it doesn’t matter, because she wakes up, and she is covered in gold and silk and a white haired, yellow haired, black haired stranger is in her bed, arms stretched out as though he can hold her.

Nothing here can hold her.

It doesn't matter, because her mother marries her to foreign things as soon as she finds one plausible, and the screams from her brothers anger are only loud enough to drown out her own tears.

 

The whines from the court-mother at the loss of her prize are the only ones her mother listens to anyways. She promises her two new diplomats to train, each more beautiful than she.

 

The court mother pouts, and insist they have red hair. She has enough of the common girls, she says.

 

Gaila does not have time for tears, for machinations and whining, but she finds them anyways. Her father is silent, a shadow behind her mother's throne and a promise whispered with blasphemous words on cold nights.

Promises buried in stories and myths and old queens in sweeping robes and old goddesses who hand her knives and tell her to cut her way through her enemies. Promises she does not know if she or him or anyone could keep.

 

She buries her tears beneath lacquered nails and a dimpled smile and a curse tucked under her tongue when she kisses her queen goodbye.

 

The painted words on her arms are in the old song, and her new husband's cannot read it, but it says, _Fire_ , it says, _Stars,_  it says, _I will burn before anything but Oris owns me_.

Her mother sees them and smiles, sharp and clever and every old law she has cut to ribbons for draping over her back bleeds.

 

“Our treaty is Filled,” her red hair glints under the sun and her twinning moons. “Once you leave my shores it is done.” The ramp to their ship is steep, made for claws and bare feet, not ankles wrapped in ruby chains and a silk shroud disguised as a wedding dress. She walks like a diplomat, power and grace and anger beneath every step. She will not look back.

 

She will live, with this. She will run. And they will come. And she will live.

 

That was five nights ago, dragged from the compound by her mother's gentle-bred sharp hands. For a few moments she had felt relief. And then she remembered that her mother had sent her to be trained. If she was going home, her training must be necessary.

 

But that was five nights ago. Even from the locked cabin in this things ship she had known how to manipulate wires, tear panels and codes and sing viruses into the engines.

 

Life support ran separately for every cabin. That careful planning was their downfall. She thinks hers will be the silence.

 

They will come. And she will scrub the beauty from her skin, cut her nails down to the quick and melt these golden coins around her waist to scrap metal, to stolen parts, to a memory she will never visit again.

 

The painted words on her arms have not faded. _Fire,_ and _Stars,_ and _I will burn before anything but Oris owns me._

 

She is not a queen's daughter here. She is not a diplomat, not anymore. She is a painted thing, a silk strewn, wire cutting, grease stained and tear stained and bloodstained _Gaila_ , trapped on a ship she killed with the power she buried in her footsteps and her fingers and she is owned by _no one_. Not Oris. Not even the Fire under her homes floating dirt.

 

She is alone, here. Surrounded by black and the stinging whispers of metal as she steers this ship to nothing. But there is, beneath the numbers and wires she runs through her mind, a calm.

 

The stars look cold from the cabin window.

 

* * *

 

**(StarFleet Academy, 2257)**

 

She kisses him, pulling herself onto his lap and his hands on her hips, warm and teasing at the hem of her shirt in a way that feels forgotten. Lips against his, soft and surprised and silent till she nips at his bottom lip and breathes, his soft gasp open and yielding and there's warmth deep in her that sings.

She pulls back and smiles, his eyes bright and blue and laughing, never at her. “I’ll follow you” he promises. “When you're captain and I'm still climbing up the ranks, I'll always follow you.”

 

It is trust and love and sometimes she wishes there was the same need in his eyes as everyone else’s because then it would be easy, then she would know. But then he says things like this, an open book only to her, and she doesn't care that he doesn't make it easy, this might be worth it.

 

She has a sister in Uhura  and a brother in Kai and a Jim, whatever he is but loyal, she has a double major and command classes and power sways beneath her footsteps when she walks in regulation boots and sunlight burns gold into her hair.

 

People here do not understand why she laughs when they call word-weavers diplomats, do not understand when she dances and calls it prayer, do not understand when she slips into Oris because their words are so small.

 

But they are willing to listen. Some more then others, but that is always how it goes. She weaves in the stories, of queens dressed in silk and blood, goddesses who give little girls knives instead of peace.

Of women who teach them to fight instead of hope.

 

Jim and Uhura help, collect the words and write them down, weave them in this dry tongue so they sing, however faintly, of Auroras and gold and a time before the great collapse when Queens and their King Consorts danced with goddesses. They sing of Oris, and she dances, a prayer, a promise, a violent becoming on a planet that is not her own but is.

 

They travel to see the Auroras in the north, piled into a hover-camper, a space smaller than a compound bath but big enough for them all. It is not the same, green and purple praying over blue black skies when night falls over crystal-hills. But she sees the stars, and lights, and she sees the sky. She sees herself, dancing in silks and knives and commendations, praying over the silence.

 

It will do.

 

* * *

 

**(Oris, StarDate 2242)**

 

Little girls learn to pray with lessened bells on their ankles, so that the goddesses will not need to suffer the missteps in their youth.

Gaila rips silk ribbons from her bedsheets and weighs it with discarded earrings off her mother's court, the discordant slink of jewels her only accompaniment.

She dances till her toes curl in silent anger, begging for a reprieve even as she sweeps them across the floor one last time.

 

Prayer makes sense to her, in a way her mother's smiles and the courts dust-whispers do not. The dance, the pause, the low ache in her thighs makes sense like the circuits in her brothers tab, twisting and dipping and saying something twice in a thousand different ways.

 

She never asks the queen if she can train as a temple-weaver. She does not need to hear her warm laugh as it ripples over old-stone and skin and rests on her shoulders. She does not need to have her ankle broken for such devodant ambition.

 

She weaves silently, discarded jewels on her legs and prayers in her steps and the goddess sun with her twin attendant moons high in the Oris sky. There are an infinite number of things she has learnt, a water storm of facts she dances into her prayer - _make me strong as a captain, brave as a klingon, proud as an andorian prince. Make me fire, make me song, make the world my swimming sea._

Make my dreams more than garnet and golden dust sacrificed at dawn.

 

She weaves. And she prays. And she builds her own dreams, in an old-stone room bedecked in pink silk and old circuits.

 

* * *

 

**(StarFleet Headquarters, 2270)**

 

If it weren't for Jim and his ridiculous ascension to the captain's chair, Gaila Vro would be the youngest captain in StarFleet history. The first Orion to rank past commander, the first female to head a ship dedicated to engine research. The first of many things.

 

She looks forward to being the last of all these firsts.

 

StarFleet had come to the conclusion that the James Kirk's style of promotions didn't really count, a move backed wholeheartedly by Jim Kirk himself. She wants to ask if he realized who would be taking his place.

 

It doesn’t matter, although she is certain he did.

 

In the last fifteen years there are a lot of things she's changed. Her hair is now close cut, curling around her ears and no further. But that was more an engine failure then a choice.

She likes it.

 

She's seen 347 different planets, sixty different “unexplainable” phenomena, and dozens new species. She has earned the trust and love and loyalty of three captains, a dozen officers, and a hundred ships. She has never lost the trust and love and loyalty of any.

 

There are a few more freckles on her shoulders, a lot more on her face, and a second piercing above her right eye, blue to compliment the gold. There are words painted on her arm beneath the uniform. They say _Stars_ , they say _Fire_ , they say, _you will burn before you presume to own me._

The old song sings beneath her footsteps, on federation ground, and she has never felt more of Oris then here.

 

In the audience, she sees Admirals Archer and T'pol. The old man held on longer than anyone expected. He also insisted on attending the ceremony, and it was still impossible to argue.

Jim is three rows down, Spock and Leonard and Christine beside him. Uhura hasn't stopped smiling since she arrived, bright and proud and so, so smug. Jim is too, but then again he always is. He always was.

 

Afterwords, when everyone who needs to give speeches has given them, and several dozen toasts have been made, to her and her crew and her ship and her research, and her father has cried twice but her brother three times, a little girl comes up to her.

 

There's a tickling kind of familiarity in the way her eyes stare, blue and wide and Gaila thinks time and space have never been linear after all. She thinks she hears an echo, faint and rushing and history begins _here_ , and _here_ , and _here._

 

Now.

 

“I'm going to be a captain someday”, she says, black curls pulled tight to two pigtails, eyes bright in a way Gaila recognizes as her own.

 

“I'm going to be captain” she says, and it is in Oris, in a language that built her and raised her and let her go, and it is in engines, a language she ripped apart to understand and twisted back together to prove she could, and it is in golden auroras. “I am going to be captain. _Just like you”_

 

“Yes,” she says, kneeling at the futures feet, earrings heavy at her ankles and fire buried in her blood. “Yes,“ she says, and it echoes over a million stars, a hundred skies, a thousand dreams she still would see. “You will.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! if you have any questions about orion culture (at least the way i write it) please comment or come yell at me on tumblr (under the same name) because at this point orion is just my oc species and gene can suck it. and i can talk about my babes forever.  
> (Kai, Gailas brother, and Gaila's social status are all mentioned in the tie in comics, as is a little of the plot. And her father rescuing her and moving to hawaii)
> 
> (i just realized the stardates suck dont do the math)


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